Alison Bechdel
American cartoonist
novelist
Samuel Beckett
Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator
Lillian Beckwith
English writer best known for her series of semi-autobiographical books set on the Isle of Skye
Saul Bellow
Canadian-born American writer
John Berger
English art critic, novelist, painter and poet
Georges Bernanos
French author, and a soldier in World War I. A Roman Catholic with monarchist leanings, he was critical of elitist thought and was opposed to what he identified as defeatism
Nicholson Baker
American novelist and essayist
James Baldwin
American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist
J. G. Ballard
English novelist, short story writer, satirist, and essayist who first became associated with the New Wave of science fiction for his post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World . In the late 1960s, he produced a variety of experimental short stories , such as those collected in the controversial The Atrocity Exhibition . In the mid-1970s, Ballard published several novels, among them the highly controversial Crash , a story about car crash fetishism, and High-Rise , a depiction of a luxury apartment building’s descent into violent chaos
Honore de Balzac
French novelist and playwright